Root Aphids

Glad to hear you are having some luck with the little s.o.b.. I got four days with the nemotodes, they got rid of gnats. I was not sure had root aphids in the first place. I got clones from my friend who had the above ground ones. I did notice after added great white, GO bio-root, GO black diamond, GO bio- marine and bio-weed plus the nemotodes my plant have noticeable grown and looks more vibrant then before. I read one guy who add the Bayer stuff and said overnight he saw more green in his plants. I know I will be more careful with clones and soil. Good Luck...rw

TruenoAE86coupe said:

Yeah i am going to do an entirely different room for my breeding projects, i tend to over ventilate including circulation fans in the room, so i am confident i would pollinate everything in my room, probably suck enough into the carbon filter pre-filter i would be dealing with it for months.
So did you keep the seeds? Now that you know they are a little less likely to hermie are you going to try some? Can i have some?

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I've come to the same conclusion about breeding in a different room. I don't know if the seeds from the JTR are viable but I'm happy to share. I have about 20 or so that look like they developed enough to crack. Most of them were white and small.

Congrats on your root aphid progress. I hope you knocked those bastards out for good!

I also have had root aphids. First in a hydro setup and they would eat on the roots that were above the water.
Now I have switched to soil and they persist.
I have put that soil ground cloth used to keep weeds out of your garden bed to close off the top of the container so they are somewhat kept from easy access in and out. Then I put my hose on the top of the container and flood the container to overflowing by putting the pot into a storage tub to contain the water.

That seemed to work after doing it daily, but then they returned.
I have now added a dunk to the water supply and I hope that helps as I keep flooding them daily.
I am also taking some cuttings because this is the only way I can think of to get clean again.

One of the indications of them in my case was a yellowing of the leaves with dark veins.
This is also the same as a magnesium deficiency so I have been foliar spraying them with a teaspoon of Epson salts in a gallon of water.

I think killing these guys is going to be pretty hard.
They are born pregnant. Even one left and you are back to a colony in a short period of time.

If anyone has some good success I would be interested as I am searching daily on the Internet for more info.

Best wishes to anyone fighting these nasty little bugs.

Well if you want them gone the consensus is imidacloprid in 75% concentration. You cannot do this within 50 days of harvest, but it will kill the aphids, and basically any other bug.
I have had good success to this point with neem oil drenches of the soil, but we are only a few days out so i am not entirely sure how effective this was, as checking for the little assholes is next to impossible. Good luck.

http://www.igrowhydro.com/InfoSheets/InfoSheet-RootAphids.pdf

i read this and it was interesting. dont know if its been posted yet.

my girlfriend happened to talk to a few growers today and she said they told her to tell me to put a layer of pipe tobacco on top of the soil. i had tried a cigarette tea but he said don't use cigarettes use pipe tobacco it is stronger. i may try it on my veggies. if imidicloprid is nicotine hydrochloride then nicotine itself should kill them right?

good link. basically sums up that bazillion page icmag thread in one page lol.

a mongo frog said:

http://www.igrowhydro.com/InfoSheets/InfoSheet-RootAphids.pdf

i read this and it was interesting. dont know if its been posted yet.

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Awesome link Thank you much mongo!!!

TruenoAE86coupe said:

Awesome link Thank you much mongo!!!

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ive suffered these aphids before. used the hardcore stuff and the nematodes.
nematodes worked great. and use yellow sticky cards to test.

So the nematodes don't get stuck to the cards? That was my one concern, since there appear to be a worm i doubt they will be an issue!
So i plan on getting a shit load of yellow sticky cards, if i would have remembered them this round i would have had a better idea what i am dealing with. Off to the hydro shop tomorrow.
O yeah except they introduced there "summer" hours, 10-5 tues-f 10-4 sat closed sunday and monday. Sounds like "go summer else" hours to me.....

Well I am back to add my experiences with these bastards to the thread. Thanks everyone for all the input and info to help growers battle this.
I decided to NOT do the SNS 203 drench. To be honest it was half being broke, and half not really wanting to coat my roots in an oil product.

What I have done is a small Mighty Wash drench of the area around the stem where it meets the rockwool cubes. (I NEVER use rockwool, and this makes me suspect that this is where my aphids came from, even after a quarantine and treatment for bugs). When I would tap on the pot, I would see the little guys crawling out of the rockwool and up onto the base of the stem. After saturating this area with Mighty Wash I have seen a great decrease in the numbers of aphids.


I also sprayed some mighty wash into the drainage holes of the pots and the next day there were some dead aphids in the catch trays with not much life anywhere to be found.


My plants are at 3 1/2 weeks flower, so I think I am just going to try the soil vacuuming/replacing with new soil suggestion, and ride it out without taking any drastic action. The plants are doing much better than I would expect with root aphids and growth is still pretty healthy and good. Figured I'd post some pics to show how they are handling it all. If you look close you can see some minor deficiencies are showing for sure though and I am just really hopeful that the harvest doesn't go to shit.

View attachment 2107916View attachment 2107917View attachment 2107918

I'll let everyone know how they finish....

Stop everything you guys are doing... it's all hopeless. I don't even have to read the thread to say that... I tried everything, spent weeks researching this stuff and literally everything failed.

Ultimately I had to come up with my own solution.

You need to switch to growing hydro. DWC, to be specific. You cannot have ANYTHING in soil anymore. You cannot exterminate them in soil unless you resort to toxic chemical pesticides that can linger in the plant for years. There's always little air pockets in soil that keep them from drowning during dunks, and a few will inevitably survive and repopulate.

Once you've switched to hydro, take all your plants, once a week, and dunk them in a 5 gallon bucket with a squirt of dish soap and a tsp of rosemary oil mixed in (peppermint works great too). Don't blow money on organic pesticides like SNS, they are a RIPOFF and the price discourages you from using them as liberally and as frequently as you need to. It costs me about 10 cents to mix up a bottle of something identical to SNS-203 which goes for 30 bucks on the shelf, IIRC.

The water line needs to be above the hydroton pellets. They should be floating. Let it sit like this for 30 minutes. So long as the water isn't really warm, don't worry, the plants will be fine.

Now, take the plants and one by one put them in empty buckets and let it drain for a bit. Rinse them with distilled water to remove some of the soap, then plop them one by one in new buckets with fresh nutes.

Take plastic bags and cut circles out of them, and cut slits in the center. Pull them over your plant so they're covering everything. Use two, the second rotated 90 degrees from the first, so the slits don't overlap, and tape everything up. This makes it a lot harder for root aphids that were flying to return to the roots.

Do this once a week for 2-3 weeks and they will be gone, forever. Each dunk kills 100% of those attacking the roots, you just have to worry about the fliers at that point. There are no air pockets to allow stragglers to survive like those that will plague you with soil.

It's been 6 months since I last saw a root aphid. It works.

Soil? coco ? hydro? I had the little fuckers on my first grow..FFOF got me good , Now everything is coco but one plant because i ran out of coco and the lil pricks are back, but will be no more in two weeks time, I let the soil dry right out till plants start to droop, sand on top and ever hole taped shut. H020 mix will kill the lil ones and big ones can not get out of sand to finish life cycle ...Lil pricks will hurt ur crop fast if you do not get em gone, sticky fly traps, hot shots . I did everything and it worked

Actually my plan is to finish this harvest, kill everything, not have any plants for several weeks, clean the crazy hell out of everything,
and START AGAIN FROM SEED.......in soil.

I've been a soil grower for over a decade and rarely have to battle bugs. I like my meds grown in soil and if done correctly maybe once every few years I have to deal with bug problems. Small price to pay for pot that I love to smoke (soil grown..)

Ne need to toss all your genetics. The flyers die within a few days, they don't do well without roots to feed on. If you can take cuttings of everytihng in rockwool simultaneously, and put them in sealed plastic bags (so flyers can't get at them) you will be good to go by the time the roots pop.

FoxFarms seems to be a regular problem. I first started growing plants indoors (not cannabis, but other stuff) 9 years ago. After getting a bag of Happy Frog I suddenly got the root aphids - the first time I've seen any pests in that entire time. It seems unlikely it was a coincidence.

IF you get soil you should sterilize it in the oven. Yeah, you'll kill the beneficial microbes, but it's better than getting pests that ruin your entire crop. To hell with organic soil! Just add your beneficials yourself to your *sterilized* soil and save a lot of grief.

DWC has been less work with better results than soil (in all categories - yield, quality, potency, appearance, density, fragrance, taste, effects) so I will never look back, but if I were to grow in soil again that's what I'd do.

Word. Thanks for the suggestions I've thought of trying to keep my genetics by doing cuttings like you suggested, I'm going to consider doing that for sure.
Just curious what nutrients do you run in DWC? Sorry to stray away from Root Aphid talk really quick.....

Hey no problem! I like to help out, some people have been very kind to me, I'm just paying it forward.

I use the Botanicare line. It's really cheap and works very well. The 3-2-4 formula for veg and the 1-5-4 formula for flower. I get 0.5g/w easy and all different strains ranging from 90% indica to 90% sativa are happy. I don't have to supplement with anything other than some calmag (also Botanicare). I use RO water to keep things simple, and because my tap water is 300ppm and kills plants. So, I fill a 5 gallon bucket up to the bottom of a 6" net pot lid, which is about 3.5 gallons of water, and add a fixed amount of nutes and a pH up solution I made (I took some potassium carbonate pH powder, 10g for a one liter bottle of RO water). It makes it really easy, no fiddling with pH meters, so it's quick work. If you're interested I can provide some of the ratios I use for young plants and monsters in flower. There seems to be no need to push ppms really high, with 800ppm or so I was at 0.5g/w with no training and only one plant under a big light. You should've seen that beast, there were 14 foot long colas on it and it took up an entire 4x4ft tent. The plants in hydro grew easily 3x faster and looked healthier than anything I've seen in soil.

The biggest advantage of hydro though IMO is that it makes problems so much easier to fix. In soil, if you have a pH problem, you have to spend all day flushing the soil, whereas with hydro you just dump the bucket and refill. In soil, if you have a nutrient deficiency, you have to try to diagnose it - is it lockout, what formula can I use to fix it, am I even idetnifying the deficiency properly, etc... and by the time you figure it out it's harvest time and the plant's in shit shape... with hydro you again, just dump the bucket, refill, and it puts on 2-4" in 24-48 hours and greens up. And then the pests! I spent months battling root aphids with everything under the sun while in soil, and I was very diligent, probably 40 hours of work a week fighting them, just crazy. When I switched to DWC it was over in a week or two.

DWC is less work too, you can get away wih leaving the plants alone for days or even weeks if you have to travel because there's jut so much water in there. But it's best to switch buckets every 2 weeks when they're small, and every week when they're big (roots filling the whole bucket).

The risk of root rot is exaggerated, so long as the water isn't 80F and so long as you don't wait a month to swap the buckets (don't wait more than two weeks) it shouldn't ever happen, and if it does happen you can kill it with phosphonates (a fungicide you can buy at hydro shops).

The risk of a plant dying from a failed pump is also exaggerated, I once forgot to turn a pump back on with that monster I mentioned earlier in late flower so it sat there with no aeration for over 12 hours on a warm summer night (OMFG) but when I checked on it it was fine. No sign anything ever even happened.

Thanks for the detailed breakdown! To be honest I have always liked the idea of not having to constantly buying new medium for my plants....

Glad it was helpful.

Yeah, hauling dirt sucks, and dumping dirt sucks too. Hydro is just flat out better and easier all around, IMO. Don't believe the hype that hydro is like some kind of rocket science, cause it's not... it's real easy. It's just roots, air, water, and nutes. It's a lot easier than soil, where you have all kinds of amendments, it gets complex and the results can be unreliable (two people doing the same thing, reporting different results).

bshdctr said:

Actually my plan is to finish this harvest, kill everything, not have any plants for several weeks, clean the crazy hell out of everything,
and START AGAIN FROM SEED.......in soil.

I've been a soil grower for over a decade and rarely have to battle bugs. I like my meds grown in soil and if done correctly maybe once every few years I have to deal with bug problems. Small price to pay for pot that I love to smoke (soil grown..)

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I think this is the best plan for the reason that you KNOW everything is gone. I am doing the exact same thing right now because I am having issues with disease (I believe botrytis) and I don't want to spend 2 years getting rid of it and dealing with sick plants. I'll be starting seeds in a different part of my house so I can have as little downtime as possible. Luckily the only bugs I have ever had to deal with were thrips, and they are easy to eliminate (Azamax). I am actually looking foreword to having a fresh start and picking my own phenos again although it sucks a bunch loosing genetics (especially your Pandy ). I don't know if I will ever take cuts again because the risk of them bringing pest/disease is much higher and not worth the chance (unless you absolutely trust the source of the cutting).